Posts

A combined commitment between the Halifax Regional Police and Halifax District RCMP now provides effective communication to the community through the ‘Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) Crime Mapping’ application pilot project. HRM Crime Mapping is an interactive online crime mapping tool created to provide the public with information about various crimes happening in the HRM. Making the spatial knowledge of existing crimes available can help increase crime prevention by making people more aware of what crimes are happening in their community.

“To ensure privacy, the crimes are plotted on the mid-point of the closest block and are not associated with specific civic addresses so as not to identify a person or an address. HRM Crime Mapping plots only selected crimes and does not represent a complete set of police data.”

HRM Crime Mapping is based on actual police reports that are updated daily and highlights 5 types of common crimes that occur in the HRM including robberies, assaults, break and enters, thefts of vehicles and thefts from vehicles. The application provides users the ability to map any of these 5 crime types on any street or community, in any of three date ranges (yesterday, the past four days or the past week).

The mapping application is easy to use, with the mapping window made up of essential 3 main parts: Crime Mapping Tool (to select the crime type and date range), Search / Link bar at the top (search by street, civic address or by community), and the map navigation panel along the left hand side (zoom in and out as well as move the position of your map). The wheels of your mouse can also be used to change your position on your map and zoom in and out.

There are some basic ‘Crime Tips’ about the five types of common crime mapped so that users can learn what to do in-order to help prevent these crimes and related links. A basic user guide has also been created to help users better make use of the mapping application.

Check out HRM’s Crime Mapping application for yourself to discover what crime has been happening in the Halifax Regional Municipality and help promote crime prevention

http://maps.halifax.ca/crimemapping/

Of-course, you could also download Halifax crime data sets from the new Halifax Open Data portal and do some GIS analysis work of your own 🙂